I make! Garbage soup and dinner rolls edition

At least, that’s how I started it. It ended up becoming vegetable chicken barley soup.

Recently, I came across the idea of saving your vegetable scraps (bell pepper tops, onion bottoms, celery tops, cilantro stems, mushroom stems, etc) in a gallon bag in the freezer and upon filling bag, making vegetable stock with them. I thought this was a really good idea. I happened to also have some chicken carcasses in the freezer from when I roasted a chicken and from two rotisserie chickens. I often don’t bother carving chickens so carefully that there’s no scrap of meat left on the bones. I just save them to make chicken stock later. This time, I decided to toss all of that into the slow cooker and making garbage soup.

And it turned out really good.

I actually dumped everything from the freezer (vegetable scraps first) into a 6 qt slow cooker before I went to bed and put in enough water to come about halfway up the chicken carcasses. Then I turned the slow cooker on low and went to bed. The next morning I was really confused as to why my house smelled so good. I’ve been waking up disoriented recently. It’s probably a sign that I should be sleeping more. But anyway, after a few moments, I remembered that I was making garbage soup. So I got up to check on it.

You know how I said that I’m not very careful about carving chickens? Turns out I’m very not careful about carving chickens. There was still a lot of meat on the bones when I fished out the carcasses. I had a large bowlful of meat after picking the bones clean. I fished out the vegetable scraps too and discarded them and added some fresh, chopped carrots, celery, and potatoes to the broth and then about 0.5 cup of pearl barley and seasoned to taste. Then I dumped all the chicken back into the pot. Left it in the slow cooker all day on low and it smells wonderful.

Vegetable chicken barley soup via garbage soup. Highly recommend it. And it costs you just about nothing since most of the ingredients were purchased for something else! Tada!

Oh, and I also tried my hand at making dinner rolls. I used this recipe (proofing the yeast first because I used dry active) and just sprinkled some parm on top.